Which will be considered big economies in the next 15 years?

Will China, Russia and Mexico, governed by extractive elites, really do as well as predicted? Is it certain Europe should be viewed as an economic write-off?

By Will Hutton / The Observer

Here is a puzzle that preoccupies futurologists, business strategists, economists and the world’s foreign offices: Who is going to do best or worst economically over the next 15 years out of the world’s current top 10 economies? This year, the US is comfortably first, twice the size of China and two-and-half times the size of the third, Japan. After Germany, at fourth, comes a cluster of countries with less than 1 trillion dollars of GDP separating them. France just beats Britain at sixth. Then follow Brazil, Russia, Italy and Canada with India, hurt by the collapse of the rupee, just outside the top 10 at 11.

The conventional wisdom, informed by conventional economics, is clear, represented faithfully by the conservative-leaning Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) in its annual world economic league table released last week. The European economies, especially France and Italy, will sink down the league table, burdened by taxation, welfare and aging populations. China is inexorably rising to take over the top spot, but in 2028, later than the CEBR thought last year. India will climb to third place. Russia will do well, as will Mexico and eventually Brazil. Britain, if it continues to shrink the state, keeps taxes low, deregulates its labor markets, continues to be open to immigration and disengages with Europe, may only fall one place in the 2028 ranking to seventh. However, even though Britain and the US will fare better than mainland Europe, the relative decline of the West will continue.

Britain’s conservative press seized on the projections with glee, proof positive that Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne is on the right track and Euro-scepticism is triumphant. The Express trumpeted: “Booming Britain will be top dog as the rest of Europe stagnates,” while one commentator in the London-based Mail wrote of Britain’s “renaissance”: The CEBR had handed the chancellor a “weapon with which to attack Labour’s agenda of despond and false promises.”

Hmm. Booming Britain? Renaissance? The problem is that the economic theory that supports these predictions is itself in a crisis. By prioritizing the role of low taxes, deregulation, the inevitable efficiency of markets and the accompanying inevitable inefficiency of the state as drivers of growth, it assumes that the last 30 years — and in particular the 2008 financial crisis — had not happened.

These are the terms in which University College London’s Professor Wendy Carlin, leading the program at the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET) to reframe the economics curriculum to include economics’ new advances, described the state of much current teaching and debate, exemplified by both the CEBR report and the reaction to it.

For the best economics now has a much more sophisticated understanding of what drives innovation, investment, productivity and growth than the simple faith in low tax and loosely regulated markets. It criticizes the refusal to understand the complexity of how economies and societies create and assimilate paradigm-changing technologies. Nor is there room for assessing the quality of a country’s entire institutional nexus — from company organization to the accountability of government — in building inclusive, value-creating capitalism rather than extractive, value-capturing capitalism. The best brains in economics are now working on how economies work in reality, rather than as prospectuses for right-wing politicians and newspapers.